This is the last photo I took during my all-night vigil in the desert. The photo looks generally southwest, up towards the crest of the Sandstone Ridge near the Wave in the Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness of Utah. My last battery gave out after the thirty minute exposure had finished, but before the camera had finished processing it. My speculation is...
As dusk darkened to night, my exposures got longer and longer until the swirl trails of the stars echoed the swirls in the rock of the Wave. View this image larger. To take this photo, I needed to wait until darkness out in the desert with the ordeal that was to come. But, I say, since all's well that ends...
The sun in the photo below apparently frames the northern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge in a perfect circle. In fact, there are apparently three "suns" in the photo. One sun is real, two of them are optical artifacts. The fake suns, including the perfect one framing the Golden Gate tower are caused by an optical phenomenon called double...
I like the way this three second time exposure makes the car lights look abstracted but still recognizable. I took this photo early in the evening from the location across the mouth of the Waldo Tunnel described in Alignment. I used a long lens, my 70-200 VR zoom combined with a 2X telextender at the maximum focal length. The...
From my rocky perch jutting out into the ocean near Sculptured Beach, I played with photographing the waves as the sun set. This tripod-mounted 1/4 of a second exposure caught the abstract expression of a wave crashing, while retaining some literal relationship to the play of warm light on the wave against the cool blue of the surrounding ocean. Wave,...
On a balmy afternoon in late October I studied the topographic map of the USGS San Francisco North Quadrant. This map shows (among other areas) the hills above Fort Baker outside Sausalito, and the northern side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It seemed to me that there was a ridge that could be climbed going up from above Fort Baker....
I thought it would be interesting to see my image of Church Towers from the Yosemite Valley floor in winter as it might have looked as a palladium or platinum toned print. Here it is: Beyond the Forest: Toned, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. First I converted the image to black and white in Photoshop, using the...
This photo shows a translucent Dahlia petal with water drops resting on the petal and refecting a peony bush in California's moderate autumn. The petal was blowing slightly in the wind. In order to get the depth of field I needed at a fast enough shutter speed to stop the motion (1/40 of a second), I boosted my sensitivity setting...
How high can you go? How low can you go? At least when the question is ISO...the answer depends on your hardware. In the case of my Nikon D200, high ISO (shown below) means ISO 1600. Low ISO (far below) means ISO 100, so there's a 16 times difference in the amount of light being captured due to the sensitivity...
The fishing trawler was returning to port through the Golden Gate. As the boat headed for the channel of moonlight, I realized that a long time exposure just wouldn't do. I wanted to capture the trawler in the moonlight, not an abstraction of the boat rendered into colored lines of motion over the exposure duration. So I boosted the ISO...
